By email to: complaints@actuaries.org.uk (with a link to this post)
Dear sir or madam
Complaint against 2 anonymous actuaries (Part 2 of 2)
With apologies for having taken slightly longer than the month I originally envisaged when I sent you part 1 on 22 December 2011, the second part of my complaint follows below.
If you require any further information on any aspect, please let me know and I shall do my best to supply it.
I am generally a fan of Microsoft – I think they have done a great job with .net, Excel and SQLServer but, like I suppose many others, I have two big frustrations with their software:
Generally, I like this printer, and have found it more reliable than the HP OfficeJet all in one printers that I have used before, but here are a couple of ways the ESPOffice 6150 could be improved:
1. It should stop ask the user to log on with Admin rights every time the Kodak Home Center (the software that is needed for scanning) is opened. This is unnecessary, unless there is a genuine software update that is available (most of the time there is not).
2. It should release memory in between scans. At the moment, when you do a scan, and save it to a file, the memory usage just increases for each such save, whereas it would be better (and ought to be possible) for the program to release the memory after each save to file when the Done button is clicked. Instead, at the moment, if you do more than about 3 or 4 scans, the memory usage goes up to 300MB or so, and scanning gets progressively slower so you have to close down Home Center and reopen it again to free the memory.
This post is an open letter to members of the Council of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries. This separate (but related) post is a letter to the Discipline Investigation Team making a complaint about the professional behaviour of two anonymous actuaries who sat on an Adjudication Panel that decided on the only professional complaint I have ever brought before. (I hope this second complaint is the last one I shall ever have to bring, but as you will see from the evidence below, I had little choice but to make it).
Open letter to members of the Council of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries
Date: 22 Dec 2011
Open letter to: all members of the Council of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries
Has the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries been breaking (on repeated occasions over the last 4 years) the standards it sets for its members? I think so
Related Links:
Appendix part 2 (a short chronology of the original disciplinary case)
Some key statements / extracts from correspondence
Here are some statements made by I&F officials (by which I mean either actuaries or non actuaries with – usually senior – roles within the I&F) including some which in my view are at best significantly misleading, or at worst false. In each case, I have added my comments in blue font and prefixed by PJL – please note that any emphasis, e.g. in bold, is mine. Please also note that, in line with the decision – with two exceptions: my own name and that of my colleague David Wilkie who is mentioned in early correspondence about the discussion board that I and he set up – not to name – or help to identify -any individual in this post -or any comments added to it - any references to he or she or they below should not be taken as necessarily identifying the gender of the person(s) concerned or their number, but a shorthand for he/she/they etc.) :
Related Links:
Appendix part 1(Some key statements / extracts from correspondence)
A short chronology of the original Disciplinary Case
Please note that, in line with the decision not to name or help to identify any individual in this post -or any comments added to it - any references to he or she or they below should not be taken as necessarily identifying the gender of the person(s) concerned or their number, but a shorthand for he/she/they etc.)
I submitted a complaint in July 2009, it was passed to an Adjudication Panel who made a Determination that there was no case to answer in late September 2010, informing me in early October. I immediately pointed out that there was at least one factual mistake in the original Determination and that it contained a final paragraph in which the anonymous members of the Panel appeared to be making a personal attack on me, via what could be regarded as defamatory comments which were unaccompanied by any supporting evidence.
Date: 22 December 2011
By email to: complaints@actuaries.org.uk (with a link to this post)
The Disciplinary Investigation Team
The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries
Maclaurin House
18 Dublin Street
EDINBURGH
EH1 3PP
Dear sir or madam
Complaint against 2 anonymous actuaries (Part 1 of 2)
I thought I’d share a few things that weren’t obvious to me at first – I hope this saves somebody out there some time.
Pasting values from Excel to SQLServer
Booleans/bit: if you copy and paste a record from a SQLServer table in SSMS (SQLServer Management Studio) into Excel, bit fields appear in Excel (as they do in SSMS) as 0 or 1. However, if you want to paste a record with a bit field from Excel into SSMS, you have to replace the 0 or 1 by FALSE or TRUE respectively, otherwise you get a (misleading) error message (“Cannot insert the value NULL into column [bitcolumn name]“) when pasting.
At the moment, you can’t connect PowerPivot within Excel 2010 directly to a Sharepoint list on an Office 365 Sharepoint site (because at the moment, the PowerPivot addin for Sharepoint isn’t provided in Office 365).
However, a solution is to connect PowerPivot to the list indirectly via connecting to an Access .accdb database which is connected to the list, either locally or on the Sharepoint site. In the latter case the address will be something like \\yourcompany.sharepoint.com@SSL\DavWWWRoot\databasename.accdb.
I thought I’d share a few tips (in a variety of areas, including Microsoft Silverlight, ASP.net and Visual Studio Lightswitch; I may organise these better – e.g. spilt these into separate posts – as and when they expand) in the hope that someone, somewhere on the web will find these useful.
Some Silverlight 4 bugs/issues
Debugging Silverlight projects: sometimes need to run Visual Studio as admin, rather than a non admin user. I have sometimes found that changes to a data bound DataGrid weren’t being reflected in debug mode, and that I was unable to break on code (Visual Studio said that symbols weren’t loaded), until I ran Visual Studio 2010 as a user with administrator rights.
Silverlight 4 “Value does not fall within the expected range” bug:
http://www.inqa.com